“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll put those words in the mouth of an egg sitting on a wall. But the question Alice asks in response is one of the most important questions you can ask about any piece of literature:
“The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
You can’t.
Communication is not just what you transmit. It’s what is received. And if the receiver doesn’t understand a word, the transmission fails, no matter how clearly you think you’ve spoken.
This is why vocabulary matters in Bartleby, the Scrivener. Not as a vocabulary lesson. As a character study.
The Narrator’s Diction Reveals the Narrator
Aristotle called it diction — one of his six elements of classical literature. The words a character uses tell you who that character is. The words each of use tell people about us. Our word choices reveal education, assumptions, self-image, and sometimes blind spots. Think about that.
The narrator of Bartleby is a lawyer, and he narrates like one, doesn’t he? Look at the word avocations that he used. He has spent thirty years in contact with scriveners because of his avocations. Not his work. His avocations. The word comes from the Latin avocatio — a calling away, a distraction from one’s primary purpose. A hobby. He’s telling us scriveners are a hobby for him, and that Bartleby stands out as one of the strangest.
This is a lawyer who deals with rich men and their bonds and mortgages and title deeds. And his hobby, for thirty years, has been studying the men who copy those documents for him. He uses another word, imprimis — a Latin legal term meaning “in the first place” — where any other person would simply say “first.” He name-drops John Jacob Astor. He uses double negatives. Complicated constructions in his narration that circle around a direct statement, softening it, qualifying it, lawyering it.
The Word “Strange” — Used 21 Times
The narrator applies the word strange to Bartleby twenty-one times across 14,000 words. That is a signal. In classical literature, not one word is wasted. A word that appears twenty-one times is not decoration. It is evidence telling us about the narrator who used that word, not just about the event he was talking about.
He cannot define Bartleby. He said so in the opening paragraph: no satisfactory biography of this man is possible. What Bartleby is remains ascertainable only from very small original sources. The narrator can describe what he observed. He cannot explain it. So he calls it strange — again and again — and lets the word carry the weight of what he cannot articulate.
Denotation and Connotation
Every word does two things at once. It denotes — it carries a dictionary definition, a literal meaning. And it connotes — it carries an emotional charge, an association, a feeling. “He died” and “he passed away” denote the same fact. They do not connote the same thing.
The narrator of Bartleby is a man who chose his words with legal precision. When he describes Bartleby’s first appearance at the office door — “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn” — he is painting a picture. Pale. Lifeless. Uninspired. Neat. Pitiful. Sympathetic. Hopeless. That is a portrait composed in adjectives and adverbs. It is the portrait of a man already disappearing, meant not just to enable us to “see” Bartleby, but to see him through the narrator’s lens.
And note the word now: “I can see that figure now.” The narrator is looking back. Time has passed. The whole story is already over, and he is recounting it. He still sees Bartleby. He has not stopped seeing Bartleby.
But words are not reality. They are representations of people, places, things, actions — tangible and intangible. But in the hands of this anonymous Wall Street lawyer narrator, the words are the evidence we have to figure things out. Read them carefully. Every one of those 14,000 is there for a reason.